Adam Lecznar

Dionysus after Nietzsche examines the way that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche irrevocably influenced twentieth-century literature and thought. Adam Lecznar argues that Nietzsche's Dionysus became a symbol of the irrational forces of culture that cannot be contained, and explores the presence of Nietzsche's Greeks in the diverse writings of Jane Harrison, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka (amongst others). From Jane Harrison's controversial ideas about Greek religion in an anthropological modernity, to Wole Soyinka's reimagining of a postcolonial genre of tragedy, each of the writers under discussion used the Nietzschean vision of Greece to develop subversive discourses of temporality, identity, history and classicism. In this way, they all took up Nietzsche's call to disrupt pre-existing discourses of classical meaning and create new modes of thinking about the Classics that speak to the immediate concerns of the present.

This volume presents a series of studies on literary, artistic, and political uses of classical antiquity in modern constructions of race, nation, and identity in the Black Atlantic. In the fraught dialogue between race and classics there emerged new classicisms, products of the diasporic chronotope defined by Paul Gilroy as originating in the violence of the Middle Passage. Contributions to the volume explore the work and thought of writers and artists circulating in the Black Atlantic, and their use of heterogeneous classicisms in representing their identities and experiences, and in critiquing hegemonic Eurocentric or racialized classicism. Ranging across anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone worlds, and coming from an array of disciplinary perspectives including historical and biographical approaches, literary studies, and visual arts, these essays join in the shared goal of examining past and present intersections between classicisms, race, gender, and social status.

This article explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception of the ancient Greek mythical figure Prometheus as a window onto the philosopher’s changing notions regarding antiquity. In the first instance it will examine the sources of the myth, both ancient and modern, in order to assess how Nietzsche’s appropriation fits into the broader history of Promethean receptions. It will then turn to two of Nietzsche’s main philosophical works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and The Gay Science (1882). By closely analysing the texture of Nietzsche’s Prometheus in these works this article will demonstrate that Nietzsche initially used the Titan as a marker of the relationship between ancient Greece and modern Germany and of the potential for a shared identity that might link them. In addition to this it becomes clear that Nietzsche’s conception of the Titan changed dramatically between the two works as well as afterwards, and this article will argue that these changes are key to understanding Nietzsche’s evolving attitude to the relationship between antiquity and modernity.

This chapter examines the forms of classicism that proliferate in the writings of the Martinican poet-politician Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), focusing in particular on his 1963 drama The Tragedy of King Christopher. The classical form of tragedy, mediated through Nietzsche, provides Césaire with a way of reconsidering the reverberations of the Haitian revolution throughout the black Atlantic as a foundational event of black identity. Césaire uses tragedy to dramatize the story of Henri Christophe, the creator of a monarchy in the Northern part of Haiti in the early nineteenth century, as a way of instructing his audience on the urgent issue of black political organisation in the mid-twentieth century.

This chapter seeks to explore two writers who are crucial to the history of media theory, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and to show how their appeals to the Presocratic philosophers regularly touched on issues of deep importance to understanding the connections between philosophy and materiality. Drawing on the seminal work of Friedrich Kittler, the chapter traces the constellation of the central mediating symbols of the body, the hand and the typewriter in Nietzsche and Heidegger, and argues that both writers stage their returns to the Presocratics in order to reflect on the correct media of philosophy.

This chapter introduces some key moments from Hesiod’s reception during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and offers a starting point for future scholarship in this new field of research. It explores examples of Hesiod’s reception by French, English, and German figures, including Voltaire, John Flaxman, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to demonstrate the European scope of the ancient author’s appeal while also drawing attention to some of the recurring concerns that animated turns to Hesiod during this period. Hesiod offers an alternative vision of Greece to the one that had gained currency during the Enlightenment; his focus on ancient Greek religious belief and rural life provided an important counterpoint to narratives of Greece as the birthplace of modern European civilization, while his poetry offered readers a personal connection with a distant cultural and historical context.

The approach to the idea of comedy that this paper will pursue is well set out in Dante Alighieri’s letter to Cangrande della Scala, where Dante explains his decision to reference the idea of comedy rather than tragedy in the title of his great work Divina Commedia (1320). Dante explains the difference between these two generic markers in terms of a distinction of plot structure rather than of subject matter: although tragedy ‘in the beginning is admirable and quiet, in the end or final exit it is smelly and horrible … comedy begins with harshness in some thing, whereas its matter ends in a good way’. The story of Dante’s search for salvation can thus be understood as comic insofar as it proceeds according to a particular structure, from forsakenness to blessedness, and thus tends towards a happy ending. In this paper I want to explore this understanding of the comic in relation to the philosophical significance of Aristophanes, and by looking at his reception in the works of Plato, Nietzsche and Freud. By looking at the speech given to Aristophanes in the Symposium, Nietzsche’s invocation of Aristophanes in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future (1886) and Freud’s allusion to his Platonic speech in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), this paper argues that the philosophical reception of Aristophanic comedy has often used the figure of Aristophanes to illustrate a way of doing philosophy that rejects the ‘tragic’ resonances of posing unanswerable questions about the limits of human action and understanding and instead focuses on elaborating a hopeful approach to existence.

Female characters from classical literature and mythology figure centrally in Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly in his understanding of the concept of truth. When Sarah Kofman explored this subject in her 1973 essay ‘Baubô: Theological Perversion and Fetishism’, it was under the sign of Baubô, the hag from ancient Greek mythology who was famous for making Demeter laugh during the search for Persephone by raising her skirt. This reference appears in Nietzsche’s preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, published in 1887, and a central element of its significance is to contribute to the overarching comic tone both of the preface itself and to The Gay Science in general. In this work, Nietzsche elaborates a comic vision of philosophy that is concerned with superficiality and appearance rather than with deep, tragic truths. This paper will demonstrate that Nietzsche anticipated this approach to the connection between humour, femininity and truth in his 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future; in this way I will argue that an appreciation of Nietzsche’s comic philosophy is crucial to understanding the particular conception of ‘truth’ that he advances in Beyond Good and Evil, as well as for appreciating how he understands the nature and the role of the figure of the philosopher.

Beyond Good and Evil is most renowned in this regard for its opening line, ‘Suppose truth is a woman—what then?’; in addition, it stages regular invocations of female figures from classical mythology, including Nausicaa, Circe, the Sirens and the Sphinx. These characters are drawn from the two ancient Greek texts Homer’s Odyssey and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and by appealing to these particular narratives Nietzsche seems to fashion an understanding of the role of the philosopher that is modeled on the masculine perspectives of an Odysseus or an Oedipus. In contrast to these epic and tragic subjectivities, Nietzsche invokes the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes to provide a very different approach to the nexus of woman and truth (see §28, §223 and §232). I will argue that the discussion of comedy that is at work in these references to Aristophanes, particularly as a dramatist who creates roles for women in his plays, lays the groundwork for the emergence of Baubô as a representative figure in Nietzschean philosophy. Furthermore, by contextualising these references against other references to the idea of comedy in Beyond Good and Evil (such as to Molière in §11, to satyr-plays in §25 and to comedy in §208), this paper will offer a reading of the contrast between Nietzsche’s conceptualisations of the tragic and comic ways of approaching both the practice of philosophy and the nature of truth.

D. H. Lawrence made explicit the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on the unpublished philosophical work now known as Study of Thomas Hardy when he chose ‘Le Gai Savaire’ to be its initial title, thus invoking Nietzsche’s 1882 work The Gay Science. In this paper. I use Lawrence’s central concern with tragedy in this work to argue two things: first, that Lawrence formulated his own philosophy as a way of getting past the tragic understandings of alienated humanity that were central to the modernist project; second, that he patterned this rejection of tragedy around the anti-tragic ideology that underpins Nietzsche’s Gay Science. By focusing on Study of Thomas Hardy, this paper argues that for Lawrence tragedy represents a state of being in which human desires are understood as excessive in comparison to the demands of the natural world: by rejecting tragic excess and embracing a Nietzschean ‘Gay Science’, Lawrence creates a vision of the future of humanity where it is able to realise its full potential by developing a worldview of moderation and integration in the natural world.

In 1842, Karl Marx (1818-1883) submitted his doctoral dissertation on the differences between the Epicurean and Democritean theories of atomism. This paper begins with Marx’s youthful treatment of Epicurean philosophy as an example of how to philosophize practically in the aftermath of Plato and Aristotle; it goes on to argue that throughout his life ancient Greece offered Marx a source of hope in the potential of human activity. This argument runs counter to the common reading of Marx’s relationship with antiquity as one necessarily characterized by failure due to his strict adherence to an iron-bound historical determinism (as in Neville Morley’s 1999 article ‘Marx and the Failure of Antiquity’). As early as 1975 Heinrich von Staden suggested that ancient Greece offered an exceptional case in Marx’s philosophy; this paper builds on von Staden’s work to argue that that the conceptual framework established by Marx in dialogue with ancient Greek texts and ideas continued to offer a way of understanding human agency that would underpin much of his later thinking.

This paper focuses on one particular nodal moment in the young Marx’s reception of the ancient world to argue that it forms a continuation of the approach to Greek antiquity that he had earlier initiated. It focuses on a cartoon published in 1843 in response to the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper that Marx briefly edited, by the Prussian government; this cartoon portrays Marx as Prometheus, chained to a printing press and gnawed by the eagle of Prussian censorship. Marx expressed his deeply felt admiration for the myth of Prometheus throughout his life; we see this particularly in his decision to quote Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound in the introduction to his doctoral dissertation. But rather than read this as just a self-contained instance of classical reception, I argue that the association between Marx and Prometheus only makes sense in the context of his relationship with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelian movement in Berlin, as well as alongside Marx’s contemporary writings on Prussian censorship and the freedom of the press in the Rheinische Zeitung: on this reading, Marx’s turn to Prometheus is not just a wistful example of nineteenth-century German philhellenism, but an earnest attempt to use a resonant mythological form to understand the possibility of philosophizing after Hegel and the difficulties of writing against the cultural status quo.

The paper concludes where so many attempts to unravel Marx’s relationship with Greek antiquity have ended in the past: the brief reference at the end of his unfinished Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1857, published posthumously in 1939) where Marx wrote about the continued resonance of ancient Greek mythology in the contemporary world:
All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine?
The recurring and jarring image of the printing-press in Marx’s discussions of ancient Greek mythology and literature, of Prometheus and the Iliad, suggests that Marx is trying to understand the relevance of ancient Greece in a world with entirely different material conditions. His attempts to renew Epicurus, Prometheus and the Iliad inspire paradoxical conclusions: for while it might now be impossible to compose them in their original form, the continued passion that they inspire is proof of a different kind of possibility in which ancient mythological forms encode ideas and provoke responses that speak to fundamental and transhistorical human passions. Marx’s readings of ancient Greece thus suggest that the recurrence of ancient forms in modernity is a key example of human beings acting against the constraints of their present conditions in order to build a more universal structure of human flourishing.

“The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche is a monodrama: no other figure is present on the brief lived stage of his existence:” so begins Stefan Zweig’s 1925 essay on Nietzsche. Zweig’s representation of the philosopher as a solitary actor on the stage of his own destiny is the starting point for this paper’s argument that Nietzsche himself viewed life and living as a form of drama complete with actors and spectators. Against the backdrop of his early philological lectures on Aeschylus’ Oresteia that emphasised the value of performance for modern understandings ancient Greek tragedy, I explore the development of Nietzsche’s ideas in the decade between the initial publications of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and The Gay Science (1882). This paper charts the shift from Nietzsche’s desire to discuss the birth of tragedy as an organic, natural phenomenon to his later programmatic deployment of the Latin phrase “Incipit tragoedia", “The tragedy begins” in the final aphorism of Book Four of The Gay Science as the proleptic motto for the drama of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This difference between German births and Latin beginnings draws our attention, I argue, towards Nietzsche’s changing attitudes about the dramatic quality of existence.

The first part of the paper focuses on The Birth of Tragedy, and on Nietzsche’s description of ancient Greek tragedy as a means of making bearable the horrors of existence for its audience: it is in the dramatic festival of the Great Dionysia that Nietzsche locates “the first time [that] nature achieves its artistic jubilee … for the first time, the tearing apart of the principium individuationis becomes an artistic phenomenon.” The second part of the paper turns to The Gay Science, and examines its recurring motif of performance and spectatorship (e.g. §236: In order to move the crowd; §261: Knowing how to end; §330: Applause) as a backdrop to the final aphorism of the books 1882 edition that casts Zarathustra as the ultimate tragic hero. The paper concludes by arguing that these two examples mark a progression in Nietzsche’s thinking from considering the relationship between tragic drama and life philologically and through the historical example of ancient Greece, towards understanding his own place as a thinker and writer within the drama of life: finally, I argue that Nietzsche’s writings about tragedy respond to his own deeply felt belief that humanity’s experience of life and existence is fundamentally dramatic.

A recurring concern of the American novelist David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was the effect of television-watching on American culture and in particular the way that it normalized an ironic and detached attitude towards the world on the part of its audience. This position, present in Wallace’s best-known novel Infinite Jest (1996) and the many short-stories and essays he published before his 2008 suicide, has invited associations between Wallace and ‘The New Sincerity’, a turn of the twenty-first century movement that sought to rehabilitate ideas like love, beauty and truth (what Wallace calls ‘single-entendre principles’) in the face of the debilitating suspicion of postmodern irony. This paper argues that Wallace considers ancient Greece and Rome as a potentially rich nodal point of this debate, but that its legacy holds an ambivalent position throughout his work. The main focus of the essay will be his 1999 short story ‘Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko’, which uses the treatment of Narcissus and Echo in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, interwoven with references to Wagnerian and Nordic stories, as the framework for revaluating myth in modern, post-television terms as ‘the ultimate rerun, 100% echo […] ambiguous, rich, polyvalent, susceptible of neverending renewal, ever fresh’. After examining this short story alongside his other allusions to Greece and Rome, I suggest that Wallace’s stance towards antiquity has implications for how we should conceptualise the sincerity of classical reception. I argue that the status quo of classical reception contains an ironic attitude towards ancient material that allows it to mean anything to anyone without any investment in the ‘single-entendre principles’ that such receptions might elucidate from radically different perspectives. Wallace offers a model for how we might develop a newly sincere attitude towards antiquity, perhaps under the moniker of a ‘New Reception’, that acknowledges polyvalence while simultaneously searching for deeper, more unifying lessons.

The revival of two thousand year old texts is not an obvious part of a future-oriented political agenda; nevertheless, this paper explores how the Martiniquan writer, intellectual and politician Aimé Césaire’s (1913-2008) reception of Greek tragedy became bound up in just such a project. As well as capitalising on what Emily Greenwood has termed the ‘fragile connections’ between Greek epic poetry and twentieth-century postcolonial concerns in his 1939 poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire was also a founder of négritude, a prominent movement of black cultural nationalism that was developed amongst students from French colonies during the early stages of the twentieth century. This paper argues that Césaire’s later dramatic works, and their exploitation of the genre of tragedy, marked a rupture with the past while also providing a conceptual vocabulary derived from ancient Greece that allowed him to express his thoughts about the future of black identity.

It begins by exploring how Césaire offered a prelapsarian reading of postcolonial black history in the early stages of his artistic career. Here, the references to Graeco-Roman antiquity that scholars have traced, mainly to Homeric epic, are allusive and exist as part of a strategy to reconstruct black history out of the blank slate that had resulted from colonialism’s ravages. But this changed in 1956 when Césaire resigned from the French Communist Party citing the following reason:

The singularity of our history, constructed out of terrible misfortunes that belong to no one else. […] What else can be the result of this but that our paths toward the future - all our paths, political as well as cultural - are not yet charted? That they are yet to be discovered, and that the responsibility for this discovery belongs to no one but us?

The historical orientation of Césaire’s project changed significantly at this stage: he chose to emphasize the necessity of building a bridge between a historicized black past and a developing black future in a way that jarred with his previous insistence on a static black present. It was at this stage of his career that Césaire started to write drama, regularly employing tragic rhetoric to describe his four plays. I focus on his second play, La tragédie du roi Christophe (1963), which dramatizes the rise and fall of the monarchy initiated by the former slave Henri Christophe in the northern section of Haiti from 1811-20. Haiti was a privileged space for négritude, since it was here that Toussaint Louverture had assumed the role of ‘Black Spartacus’ to lead a slave rebellion against French colonial forces in 1791, an historical event that Césaire discussed elsewhere as being the moment when black consciousness entered history.

Though this theatrical piece relates to a specific moment of black history and contains no references to the ancient lineage of the genre, I proceed to show that the play contains a nuanced engagement with Greek tragedy and its later theorisations. Césaire stated in a 1964 interview, describing his reading habits in the late 1930s, that ‘J’ai été … vivement impressionné par le livre de Nietzsche sur la tragédie grecque’; Césaire’s encounter with Nietzsche’s Greeks, and specifically those of The Birth of Tragedy (1872), is integral to the historical point that the playwright wanted to make with his chosen genre. While Césaire anchored his tragic vision in Nietzsche’s conceptual binary of Apollo and Dionysus, he did so in a way that reversed the Nietzschean tragic imperative to peer under Apolline civilization and rediscover primal Dionysiac powers; Césaire rather seeks to explore the possibility of Apolline construction over the Dionysiac void. Tragedy becomes Césaire’s chosen artistic medium for salvaging the past and engineering the future of the black race; but that this move depends on the mobilisation of a European philosophical legacy betrays the ironic rejections that lay at the heart of his dramatic project.

Perhaps the most famous treatment of love in Greek antiquity was Plato’s Symposium, which depicts Socrates discussing this topic with other luminaries of fifth century Athenian society; it is also a work that Friedrich Nietzsche would describe in letters from 1864 as his ‘favourite poem’ and ‘a work of antiquity that is especially dear to me.’ James Porter has already suggested that the Symposium offers a ‘virtual leitmotif’ for Nietzsche’s first philosophical work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, published eight years after Nietzsche’s initial comments on the Platonic dialogue. Building on Porter’s insight, this paper draws on an essay written by Nietzsche while he still attended Schulpforta entitled ‘On the Relationship of the Speech of Alcibiades to the other Speeches in the Platonic Symposium’, again from 1864, to argue that Plato’s representation of Alcibiades is a further key point of contact between the two works. At the end of Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann used words of this Platonic character to provide ‘an epitaph for Nietzsche’; this paper uses this as an invitation to further explore the importance of Alcibiades to Nietzsche.

Alcibiades was a prominent Athenian politician and soldier, and he bursts in at the denoument of Plato’s philosophical to offer a powerful counterpoint to the bloodless and intellectual ideas about love that the other speakers, and in particular Socrates, have just advanced. He offers a sensational and highly personalised account of a failed love affair with Socrates full of Dionysiac imagery. In his 1864 essay, Nietzsche elaborated at length on the antagonism between Alcibiades and Socrates, drawing attention to ‘the opposition [Gegensatz] of their two natures’ and their conflicting attitudes towards love. I argue first that Nietzsche’s characterisation of this opposition is an early manifestation of the conceptual schema of Dionysus and Apollo from The Birth of Tragedy. Secondly, I explore how Nietzsche’s early characterisation of Alcibiades as a Dionysiac lover is a crucial background to Nietzsche’s whole philosophical self-conception. Finally, I suggest that to imagine Nietzsche as ‘Alcibiades in love’ provides a way of further appreciating the modern philosopher’s deep fascination with Socrates. Nietzsche clearly held a longstanding interest in Plato’s most human depiction of love’s effects on the individual: this paper demonstrates the resonances of the Platonic Alcibiades throughout Nietzsche’s philosophical project.

In 1939, Léopold Sédar Senghor would conclude his essay ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ with the following comment: 'The ancient myth of Antaeus has not lost its truth ... This encounter between the Black and the Greek is not strange. I fear that many of those who today appropriate the Greeks do so in betrayal of Greece. It is the modern world’s betrayal, which has mutilated man by making him a ‘rational animal’, or, rather, a ‘God of reason’.' I want to use this paper to think about how we should discuss the modern ramifications of Greek antiquity in the aftermath of its Antaean appropriation by black authors. Using the example of Aimé Césaire, I will argue that the echoes of Greek tragedy that permeate his dramatic works create spaces of tension that herald the irruption of postcolonial concerns into his explicitly anticolonial project. This will involve analysing his investment in ancient Greek tragedy through the filter of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Césaire would state in a 1964 interview ‘J’ai été … vivement impressionné par le livre de Nietzsche sur la tragédie grecque’, and in this paper I want to think about the implications of a conjunction between Nietzsche’s ideas about Dionysus and the importance of tragedy with Césaire’s specific political project. The complex reception history of Greek tragedy allows the juxtaposition of these thinkers from radically different intellectual and cultural traditions and lets us think about the precarious position of classics at the start of the twenty first century.

In this paper, I will draw on archival material to discuss the first performance of Wole Soyinka’s play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite at the National Theatre of Great Britain in the late summer of 1973. I will argue that Soyinka and the National Theatre presented certain characters, including the ‘fully negroid’ slave leader from the chorus of slaves that Soyinka integrates into his adaptation of Euripides, in such a way as to emphasize the performative dimension of ethnicity. This will involve tracing the influence of négritude, a renowned twentieth century movement of black identity, on Soyinka’s writing to demonstrate the way he negotiates a space for a discussion on the limitations of such a movement throughout his Bacchae. I will further suggest that ancient Greek tragedy provides an excellent platform for such a meditation due to its historical role as an accessory to white Western narratives of cultural hegemony.